Twenty Minutes of Reasons to Use the RemedyBG Debugger
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a demonstration of what fast, well-built developer tooling looks like and of why a debugger beats print statements.
What it is
Casey Muratori gives a fast tour of the RemedyBG debugger for Windows, which he uses daily. He shows its speed and features, especially the watch window.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec PainfullyNormal · 2022-05 · on “Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?”
A debugger like RemedyBG, but for linux and macos. Bonus points if you could use it for all the things, including but not limited to: WASM, javascript, android, and iOS. To clarify: I use Vim as a text editor. I use it for all of my programming editor needs no matter what I'm making. I also make a large variety of things because I'm a consultant. Vim has never let me down as far as being able to intelligently edit everything from React to assembly and everything in between on every desktop OS. I'd like a debugger that is suitably small, fast and flexible. [LINK] Here's Casey Muratori demonstrating all the way in which RemedyBG rocks. [this video]
Strong rec vinyl7 · 2022-06 · on ““I think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements””
Anyone frustrated with debuggers, check out RemedyBG [LINK] Insanely fast and capable debugger for Windows. [this video] (I have no relation to the project, just think it's great)
Recommends vinyl7 · 2022-06 · on “Windows 95 in Electron”
> I start Visual Studio, which doesn't feel faster than Electron Well...Visual Studio is a part of the horribly written software collection. Here's an example of actually good software: [this video]
Recommends fwlr · 2023-03 · on ““Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion”
>What’s an example of a fast debugger? My apologies in advance if this feels like a gotcha, but… Casey ended up swapping to RemedyBG for debugging. He made a video about why. From about 0:50 onwards he talks about the speed and feature set of the watch window [this video] Also, I don’t mean to be rude by ignoring all the questions you posed; they’re good questions, I just don’t have answers for them (I would hope the developers whose full-time job it is to build debuggers would , though).
Recommends dundarious · 2024-08 · on “Why You Should Learn Linux (As a Developer)”
The watch windows are vastly inferior in the kinds of formatted information they can very quickly show, as the program is stepped through. Take a look at "Twenty Minutes of Reasons to Use the RemedyBG Debugger": [this video] Haven't tried the Qt or KDE or Jetbrains environments in about 3 years, but last I did, they were much like Visual Studio -- slow, odd latency in displaying formatted values as you step through, lack of easy ways to format data in a human readable way in the watch window. To be clear, when I say "slow", I mean the GUI is slow, not the underlying debugger, which I presume is plenty fast.